NORFOLK

The sports media tends to glorify football.

We breathlessly show up week after week to listen to coaches pontificate at weekly news conferences. We routinely chronicle game-winning touchdowns, profile players’ personal lives and write about games won and lost at times as if football is a life and death affair.

What we don’t do often enough is write about the dark side of the game, about the players whose lives have been turned into a living hell by the wear and tear of hundreds blows to the head.

This is about that side, as told by Jim McMahon, the former NFL quarterback who was at the Norfolk Waterside Marriott on Thursday to speak to the American Veterans national convention.

If you’re middle-aged, you likely remember McMahon as the brash, good-looking and at times controversial Chicago Bear who clashed with his coach, Mike Ditka, and NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle. He also earned two Super Bowl rings in 15 pro seasons with seven teams.

I was 30-something when he was at his best and relished both his on-the-field performance and his off-field antics. He was the star of the Bears’ rap video, “The Super Bowl Shuffle.”

He once mooned sports writers when they asked about the status of an injury to his buttocks, and he entered his first public event with the Bears holding a beer.

McMahon was a tough guy who suffered numerous concussions, a broken neck and a lacerated kidney. He recalls team doctors passing out pain killers like they were candy and shooting him up to deaden joint pain.

By 2011, 15 years after he retired, he was diagnosed with early onset dementia.

Dressed in a white T-shirt adorned with an American flag, and wearing casual shorts and an earring in his left lobe, McMahon laid it all out over lunch in Shula’s 347 restaurant. He talked for 90 minutes about health struggles that nearly drove him to suicide, and how his life has been transformed by a New York chiropractor.

“I was living like a vegetable,” he said. “I’d walk from the bedroom to the kitchen and tell my girlfriend I was going to the store. She’d come down there half an hour later and I’d still be standing there.

“She’d ask, ‘Have you been to the store yet?’ I’d think, ‘Aw, that’s why I have my car keys.’ Sometimes, I couldn’t find my way home. I’d know I was close, but couldn’t quite figure out how to get home.

“I felt lost.”

Things only got worse as the disease progressed.

“My head hurt so bad that I would mostly stay in my room for months at a time,” he said. “The shades were down. Any kind of light hurt.

“I couldn’t remember where I was, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do. The pain was like somebody sticking ice picks in my head.

“If I’d owned a gun, I’d probably have committed suicide. I just wanted the pain to end.”

His struggles were revealed publicly in a 2012 Sports Illustrated story that made him one of the poster children for the long-term health consequences of playing football. It also led to a phone call from New York chiropractors, who told McMahon they thought they could help.

McMahon flew to New York and got daily treatments for a week from Dr. Scott Rosa that offered relief, if not a cure. Rosa told him that his neck was out of alignment and had caused a blockage that trapped fluid on his brain. That was causing his headaches, dizziness, depression and memory problems. Rosa manipulated his neck to open the blockage.

“The first time he did it, my head was so full of stuff it literally felt like the toilet flushing,” he said. “I could actually feel the stuff draining out of my head.”

Now 57, McMahon goes back every few months for more manipulation.

“It’s hell getting on a plane with your head all swelled up. I literally squeeze my head for four or five hours on a flight. But as soon as he adjusts me, I’m good again.”

His treatments are controversial, and when he urged Roger Goodell to speak with Rosa, McMahon said the NFL commissioner ignored him. Goodell said he trusted the Harvard neurosurgeons the league had hired to study the issue.

The health problems of former players may be more widespread than we once imagined. Autopsies of the brains of former players donated to science revealed that 99 percent of NFL players, and 177 out of 202 of all former football players, showed signs of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). It can lead to memory loss, depression and suicidal behavior.

McMahon agreed six years ago to donate his brain to research.

“I’m not going to need it after I’m dead,” he said.

McMahon came to Norfolk largely to support Brad Soden, a friend who invented a “tank chair” for his wife after she was paralyzed in a car wreck in 1999. He made her a chair with tank treads so she can fish and camp with her family.

McMahon thinks Soden’s chairs can help wounded warriors.

McMahon and Soden are set to do a pilot for a TV show, which would chronicle real stories of how they’ve helped veterans. They hope it will be picked up by the Discovery Channel.

“Reality is not the Kardashians and all of the other crap you see on TV,” he said. “I think (TV executives) are beginning to see that it would be good to see a show about what people are doing to help veterans.”

Many veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars also suffered concussions and after their deaths, some have been diagnosed with CTE, which has no cure. McMahon has been passionate about helping veterans since he was a 10-year-old in San Jose, Calif., during the Vietnam War.

“A lot of guys would come back through Frisco,” he said. “Protesters would be out there burning flags and spitting on these guys. I couldn’t understand why they hell people would want to do that to our veterans.

“These guys didn’t want to go there. Our government sent them there."

McMahon does 15 or so fundraisers a year for vets groups, and veterans seem to love McMahon in return. He spoke for less than a minute at the AMVETS convention but drew a standing ovation.

Invited by the Army to spend time in Iraq in 2006, he was less than a mile from Saddam Hussein when the dictator was hanged. He also part of a group that underwent a mortar attack and slept for a night in Hussein’s former palace.

McMahon is also an outspoken proponent of legalizing marijuana, which he says he has used for 44 years. He uses cannabidiol, a marijuana derivative known as CBDs, to relieve inflammation.

”When I was playing, they’d give out Vicodin, Percocet or Oxycontin,” he said. “But according to the NFL, you can’t smoke a joint because that’s bad, that’s addictive, and that’s ridiculous. {%%note} {/%%note}”

As we spoke and ate lunch, more than a dozen fans stopped by to shake his hand, ask for a selfie or an autograph. McMahon was stereotyped as a prima donna, but he patiently engaged with each fan. He seems like a good dude.

Former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula was eating lunch a few feet away, and McMahon took a few minutes to pay homage to the 87-year-old football legend.

Not that he always speaks respectfully of former coaches. McMahon is in the College Football Hall of Fame, but hasn’t made it to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“That’s all about statistics, and you don’t have good stats when you play for Ditka and the Bears,” he said. “We were a running team. Boring as hell, that offense.”

Ditka was frustrated by McMahon’s penchant for changing plays.

“He always thought I did it to piss him off,” he said. “But I did it to win games. He wasn’t a very good offensive coordinator. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing.”

He delivers a tough message when he speaks to parents about youth football, telling them: Keep your kids off the gridiron until they are juniors in high school.

“They can learn all of the fundamentals playing flag football,” he said. “When they’re in high school, their bodies are physically able to hold up.

“You see some of these kids – 6, 7 and 8 years old – they look like bobbleheads. They can’t even hold up their heads, much less a helmet.

“A lot of parents don’t want to hear it. A lot of kids don’t want to hear it. But I tell parents, ‘Would your rather see your son play football or be in a wheelchair?’ ”

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should be relevant to the topic at hand, factual and thoughtful.
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